Instant Genius - How learning to fail better can help us to succeed

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Not all failures are equal. In fact, some of them can present us with valuable opportunities to learn new things and make new discoveries. The trick is failing in the right way. In this episode we catch up with Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of the book The Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach us to Thrive. She tells us how to identify different types of failure, how we can examine their causes and how we can learn to fail better to make our lives richer and more rewarding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized matter class in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Not all failures are equal. In fact, some of them can present us with valuable opportunities to learn new things and make new discoveries. The trick is failing in the right way. In this episode, we catch up with Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, an author of the book, The Right Kind of Wrong, Why Learning to Fail can teach us to thrive.

She tells us how to identify different types of failure, how we can examine their causes, and how we can learn to fail better to make our lives richer and more rewarding. So before we sort of get into the meat of this conversation and this topic, I think you work in a kind of unusual field. So how did you come to study that? Well, it's a long story. So I'll try to make it quite short. I came out of university, out of college, with an engineering degree. And I actually worked in engineering for a while.

And in all the projects I was involved with, I continually discovered that I was quite intrigued. I was more intrigued by the people part, by the team breakdowns, by the role that just human behavior and group dynamics played in the success of projects. So just kind of parked that in the back of my mind. I didn't really know what to do with it. Didn't know that the field I mean existed even. But at a certain point, after three years or four years of working, I had the chance to get a job in an organizational consulting firm.

And I was doing research on, you know, what were some of the primary ways that organizations can change as they need to in a changing world. And I just came alive. I loved it. And I loved it so much. It was, you know,

I just couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. But after three or so years of that, I began to feel inadequate about my lack of business training and my lack of psychology training. that all I had was this kind of engineering, formal education. So I decided to go back to school. And honestly, I didn't know. I knew I would get smarter if I went back to school.

I'd learn a lot. But I didn't really appreciate the degree to which a PhD program is the entry-level job for an academic career. I mean, I just had this idea that I'd learn all this stuff, and then I'd go back out and I'd be better at it. And that's, of course, not what happened. What happened was I really was and remained genuinely intrigued. by this field of organizational psychology, organizational behavior. But I discovered that that was

that you could stay as an academic forever. You could do research, you could teach, you could sort of work with people and write, and it was a great career path for me. Great. So talking about writing then, let's move on to your new book, The Right Kind of Wrong. So this is all about failure

and how we should think about it differently, and we shouldn't be thinking about it necessarily. is a bad thing. With great success, come great failures along the way. So the way I like to think about it is that in any field, the only way to break new ground

is through experimentation, and not all experiments can succeed by definition. So we have to become more tolerant of failure than we spontaneously are if we wish to accomplish challenging goals, either in life or in our organizations. So drilling down into that a bit more then, in the book you split failure into three separate categories. Can you tell me about those, please?

Yes, so there's three separate categories, and I'll come right out and say that one of them is good. One is the kind of failure that we should pursue and celebrate and welcome, and the other two are in fact not so good. We should, in fact, do everything we can to prevent them. So I'll start with the good kind. And I call them intelligent failures. And I define them as the undesired result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. And more technically, the four criteria are that you're in new territory. There isn't a known solution to get the result you want.

In pursuit of a goal, it's not just random wandering around. You're trying to get somewhere or discover something or accomplish something. And you've done your homework. You've found out what there is to know about this topic so that your experiment is a thoughtful one. And finally, the failure is as small as possible to gain the learning. So all of science uses that technique, of course. I mean, we take that for granted. This is the bread and butter of scientists.

Any scientist who wants to discover new things and make a contribution to her field knows that she must fail along the way. The same is true for inventors. I think the same is true for elite athletes, and on it goes. With great accomplishment often comes smart failure, intelligent failure along the way. Now, the other two kind, I call them complex failures and basic failures. The basic failures are single-cause failures. They're caused by human error. You make a mistake in known territory, you get a bad outcome.

And I'll give a quick example, which is a couple of years ago, some city, bank employees literally made the human error of checking the wrong box in a financial transfer form and accidentally transferred the principle of a giant loan rather than the interest. They accidentally transferred $800 million to a corporate client and they were not able to get it back. So that is huge, right? That's a huge economic failure. But it's basic. Like one small error and that happened. Fortunately, most basic failures aren't that large economically and otherwise. But complex failures are, I like to call them the perfect storm. They're multi-causal. They occur when a handful of factors, none of which on their own, would have led to the failure,

come together in just the wrong way to create a bad outcome. So let's have a look at the basic failures there. Is there anything that we can do to about minimizing the chance of these occurring? There's a whole set of things we can do, and this is going to be a very boring list, right? But let me get started anyway, right? So share best practices, ensure that people are trained in the procedures they need to do to get the result, encourage great teamwork so that we can catch and correct each other's human error. You know, there will be times when each of us makes a mistake, right?

It'll happen, but it's less likely to produce a failure. if I've got great teammates who are saying, hey, Amy, don't do that. That's not quite right. And I say, thank you. And we've prevented a failure. So they are the regular blocking and tackling of excellence in any known territory. If we're building an automobile on the assembly line, we follow that procedure exactly. We speak up if something doesn't look quite right. But then we prevent the basic failures that might otherwise happen if we were sloppy or not paying attention. So it's vigilance, It's training, it's teamwork, it's checklists, it's all that stuff that help us, valuable human beings do what we're supposed to do in known territory.

So let's have a look at the complex failures now then. Are they multiple basic failures that pile up one on top of another, or are they just things that are outside of our control? I mean, it's sometimes the case that there are multiple basic failures, but more classically, the complex failure, the factors that contribute to a complex failure on their own, independently would not have led to a failure. Any one of them would just be sort of innocuous. Maybe they're a little off in some way, but they're not really materially wrong or just there was sort of bad weather. You know, supply chain breakdowns, for example, would be, you know,

there might be some worker shortages over here. That wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that it also intersected with some major thunderstorms over here. And the combination of those two factors led to the failure. The sort of crux of the book really is how to fail well, I suppose, if you can put it that way. How did you hit upon this idea? And what sort of research or study do you do to flesh it out? You know, way back when, when I decided to go to graduate school, my driving question was from the change work that I had been participating in, my driving question was, how do we help organizations learn in a world that keeps changing? And the technology changes, market conditions change, globalization, digitalization,

all of those factors mean that organizations have to keep updating their processes or developing new products and services to stay relevant in a changing world. I was interested in that, and early on in graduate school, I realized that teams varied enormously in how willing and able people felt to speak up about mistakes or when they need for help or when they had a dissenting view. Like, they just were palpable differences in the climate of different work teams, even in the same organizations. And sort of noticing that, that just seemed really important because I think I always knew, all of our listeners know that you're supposed to learn from mistakes. You know, your elementary school teachers told you that. Your parents told you that. You're supposed to learn from mistakes. You're supposed to learn from failures. But what I was

seeing was it was much easier in some groups than others, primarily because they weren't able to speak up honestly and openly about things. And that got in the way of their learning, which then gets in the way of innovation and adaptation and all the rest. And so for decades, really, I thought that failures and mistakes, which aren't the same thing, were really important issues for learning, but they're really fraught. We human beings don't like to fail and we don't like to admit failure. And so I thought it was worth digging into. Yeah, I think that's really interesting.

You're talking about the people being able to admit, you know, because for many of us, failing feels so bad, you know, but everyone does it all of the time. You know, is that sort of baked into the culture or all? the environment or workplace? Yes, all of the above. It's baked into the culture. It's baked into the, it's baked in many, if not most workplaces. And it gets in our way. And where does that come from? You know, I sometimes think it's, it's like residual mental models or taken for granted beliefs from the industrial era. The formula for success in the industrial era was to figure out how to make or provide something that customers wanted.

You know, you'd muck around to figure it up, but then once you figured it out, you'd mass produce it. And your primary job was to make sure everybody did everything just so. And so you didn't want people experimenting and trying new things on the assembly line, for instance. And so we learned to equate kind of conformity

with high performance. But nowadays, it's diversity. and creativity that lead us to high performance. But our mental models are still stuck in that old era. So what does that mean? We want to be perfect. We want to be flawless. We want to not ever make a mistake. We want to never fail. But if you want to never fail, then you will never be able to achieve anything truly remarkable. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step? Not about changing who they are. Just finding the right kind of support. At Kingsley Manor, life stays expressive, connected and full of character, shaped by people who have lived interesting lives and aren't finished yet.

So it doesn't feel like a change. It feels like a continuation. Explore your options at canesley Manor.org, a non-profit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio, and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal, have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting and fascinating point. And that brings me on to what I was going to ask about high performing individuals,

which are calling the book, Elite Failure, practitioners, which is an amazing phrase. So can you give me some examples of that and explain what sort of common characteristics that they share? Sure. So I, you know, when I first, I first came up with that term and I was just being playful and I wasn't really going to use it. It was just, it was like a joke. The elite failure practitioners. And then I said, no, that's exactly right. I mean, that is what they are and let's celebrate it. So I highlight many in the book, ranging from Jocelyn Bell Burnett, a sort of award-winning astronomer who was born in Northern Ireland decades and decades ago, grew up in the 60s and became this incredible scientist. I talk about René Rizepi, the celebrity chef from Denmark. I talk about even Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor from a couple of centuries ago.

And James West, an African-American inventor who invented the microphones that are powerful. our work here today. And all of these people have in common, a remarkable persistence. I mean, Angela Duckworth might call it grit, just that willingness to keep on trying in the face of obstacles and hurdles. So they've got that going for them. I think they're driven by curiosity. I mean, they each to a person just genuinely want to, genuinely want to find out what happens if, you know, if I do this, what happens? And rather than, seeing the world is sort of rebuking them when they get it wrong, they kind of see it as teaching them when they get it wrong. I don't believe they're born that way, maybe some of them

are, but they learn to be that way. And then they have a rather unusual tolerance for failure. So you say that, unusual tolerance of failure. Is that something that we can develop in ourselves? I think it is. I increasingly think of it as like failure muscles. If you never fail, failure muscles are very weak indeed. And the most of the most of the most of, you're very weak indeed. And the more you fail, the more you realize I didn't die as a result of that failure. I didn't die of embarrassment or anything else. I'm actually okay and I learned something and maybe it got me a step closer to where I'm trying to go. So I do think we learn how to tolerate failure by tolerating it. I know that sounds a bit circular. No, that makes perfect sense. So I think a lot of people listening

might say, well, you know, this all sounds a bit like you touched on earlier, the Western scientific method. Your theory is that it applies universally across disciplines. How can I apply that to my own life? I very much agree with and in fact value the connection to the Western scientific method. A key theme in the book is that we should all learn to think more like scientists. We don't have to become scientists, but we should think more like scientists who don't last long as scientists if they are afraid of failure, right? Because that will be, that is part of their job, is to run thoughtful experiments, many, if not most, of which will not succeed. And I think we err, most of our are taken for granted behaviors and assumptions are that, you know, I'm supposed to get it right

every time I'm supposed to be perfect. I'm supposed to be good at this already, even though I haven't done it before. But those are, those are kind of errors that are baked into our head and our culture. but if we can decide, I'm going to think more like a scientist. It doesn't matter whether you're a musician or an athlete or a chef, you are trying to build up your curiosity, build up your willingness to experiment in new terrain, and build up your tolerance for the feedback that it gives you. And that, I think, is a really important formula for having an adventurous and full life

and also for succeeding in almost any field. So what do you think are a lot of common roadblocks that are in achieving this? Like we've mentioned sort of fear, you know, I think a lot of people think, well, if I don't try, I can't fail, etc. I think we've all done that probably. I mean, what other things are there that can perhaps get in our way? Well, I'll add to that thought about, you know, if I don't try, I can't fail because it's absolutely true. But of course, there's another failure you then become at risk for, which is the failure of obsolescence. losing joy and adventure in your life. So you don't, you know, ultimate, like today, you stay safe,

but then longer term, you've harmed yourself through that thinking. The main barriers are basically found in your self-talk, that spontaneous belief, I don't want to make a mistake, I don't want to mess up, and, you know, people will think less of me if I do, and then in your cultural messages, or either cultural large or immediate culture, your group, your team, your family, that are kind of reinforcing, they're celebrating your successes, they're praising you for the things you get right, and you're getting negative feedback or pushback for things you got wrong. And we all far prefer the praise than the criticism. You know, we'd much rather people say, wow, that was great, great job, than people say,

here's some things you could have done better. It's just not as much fun. So we have to train ourselves to say, thank you so much for the feedback, you know, inside your head, sort of say, okay, this doesn't feel great at the moment, but I'm actually really grateful because it's going to make me better tomorrow. So sort of coming off the back of this idea of applying scientific method to these things, in the book you mentioned kind of analyzing the range of causes of failure, how they should be treated differently? I think that's quite valuable advice there. Could you run us through that? Yes. You know,

I primarily talk about this because I think so many organizations get this wrong. So I say just hypothetically, let's say something, you know, a failure happens in your team or your family. Now, there is a theoretical range of causes that could have been responsible for that failure. And I'm going to say on the very left of my spectrum is sabotage or, you know, deliberate deviation from a rule or a guideline or a procedure and you did it on purpose. Rather than adjacent to that might be inattention. You just were mailing it in. You weren't really trying.

And I keep going to the right and I say inability. Like I haven't yet been trained or I haven't done enough practice to be good at that piano piece yet. And then I go on to just challenge like an Olympic sport where it's just genuinely too hard to do it right every time. So I fell short, but that's, you know, it's sort of the nature of the beast. And then finally, on the far right,

I have experimentation, right? I conducted a deliberate, you know, scientific or otherwise experiment, and I was wrong, and it failed. I say that as we go from left to right, we go from obviously blameworthy to obviously praiseworthy. And I'll often ask people in companies,

you know, an audience of people, I'll say, you know, what percent of failures in this company are caused by blameworthy events? And the answers are usually like, well, less than 1%. I mean, we don't have a lot of employees around here or in this family who are, you know, going out of their way to just cause havoc and sabotage our activities. So then I say, and so they're sitting there wondering, like, why do I even ask this? And then I say, well, what percent get treated as if they were caused by blameworthy events?

And then I hear laughter, right? because then people immediately recognize, yeah, we're responding to things the wrong way. You know, we're automatically responding to things that go wrong by, you know, looking for the culprit, shooting the messenger, blaming the person who, by the way, probably feels bad enough already.

And it's illogical. Like, it's like we have an illogical response that further challenges people in doing the experimentation and innovation work upon which the future depends. So that brings me on to another term that you mentioned, which is psychological safety. So what does that mean? And how can we develop a culture of psychological safety?

Well, it means very simply a culture where it's really a learning environment. But it's a culture where people believe that they have permission to share their questions, their concerns, their dissenting views, their crazy ideas. And that that's expected. Not that it's easy, but that it's expected around here. Or another way to put that is they do not believe they will be punished for speaking up about sort of work-relevant or situation-relevant content. Now, that sounds like, well, you know, sounds pretty straightforward. And yet the reality is most workplaces don't have it.

You know, there's a very natural and well-learned tendency to engage. in impression management. We worry about what others think of us. We particularly worry about with the boss things. And so we hold back. It's always easier to be silent than to speak up. Silence costs you nothing. Speaking up might cost you something. So you'll always err on the side of silence unless work has been done to create this kind of candor and engagement that psychological safety represents. And the way you create it, you know, the way you build it is, almost like a good scientist would do, you call attention to features of the work that require it. Like you sort of say, we've never done a project like this before.

We're going to need everybody's observations and thoughts along the way because we're each going to miss things that others see. Right. So that's a factually true statement in many situations. So you might not even think you have to bother saying it. You have to bother saying it because you're creating that rationale for why it makes sense to take the interpersonal risks of voice. and then probably the most powerful thing you can do as a colleague, as a manager, is to ask questions, right? Ask good questions. You say, oh, what are you seeing? What are customers saying?

You know, what ideas do you have? Because when you ask questions, I promise you, it makes it mighty awkward for the other person or persons to sit there quietly. Right? It's, you're doing it right now, right? You're illustrating it. You're asking me a question. I couldn't possibly just sit here. like refusing to answer.

It would feel so strange and awkward. And it would be awkward and strange. And then finally, of course, if we can learn to respond in a learning-oriented way to the ups and the downs, right? Someone brings you bad news. You say, thanks for that clear line of sight.

Someone offers a wildly different opinion than yours, and you say, that's interesting. Let's consider it. You just have to respond in a learning-oriented way if you want to keep it going. So another thing that you mentioned, like sort of slightly more technical thing that plays a part in all of this is something called systems thinking. So can you briefly run me through what that is and how we can apply it to these types of issues? Systems thinking is about recognizing our human tendency to focus in on parts, not holes.

So we'll look at elements and we will fail to think clearly about how the elements interact. relate with each other, you know, to create systems. And the behaviors, the behavior of systems is quite distinct from and unpredicted by the nature of the different elements. I mean, I think my favorite scientific example is that both diamond and pencil lead are 100% carbon atoms. That's it, right? Like, wow, you know, one of them's soft and gray and inexpensive, and the other is clear and sparkling and very expensive. And the only difference is the relationships between the carbon atoms are different. One is a triangulated matrix and the other sort of planes of hexagons.

So I like that example just for saying, gosh, you know, if we thought about just the parts, we wouldn't see that. We wouldn't understand it. Now, our human systems and our organizational systems are similar, that we can zoom in on, you know, the marketing department or the manufacturing. And if we don't understand how those two are relating to each other and coordinating carefully with each other, will produce failures that we don't intend to produce. We tend to think linearly. Like, I think X causes Y, and that's the end of the story. So if I do more X, I'll get more Y,

and off we go. Most of us tend to fail to see that Y turns around and causes changes in X, right? That causality is loopy and circular, not just linear going forward into the future beautifully, in a mechanistic way. Systems thinking, as you allude to, is quite technical and challenging. And, you know, there's no simple way to kind of just introduce that lens into, you know, every aspect of your life and work. But you can learn the habit of asking two important questions. Like, if I do this here now or make this decision here now, who else and what else will be

affected? Just get into the habit of that, right? Because the chances are pretty good that you'll, you might spot a couple of things just by thinking about it that you might have missed. You might prevent some kind of bad outcome that was preventable by that simple question, or what will happen later as a function of me solving this problem this way right now. Certainly a lot to chew on there, but sort of by way of summing up, like if there's one single thing that you'd like somebody who's listening to this to take away from it, what would that be, you know, one piece of leaving advice?

take more risks. We are risk-averse as a species. Our society makes us more so, but take more smart risks to bring more adventure, accomplishment and even joy. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor of Leadership and Management, Amy Edmondson. To read more about the topics we discussed, pick up a copy of a book, The Right Kind of Wurrower. wrong, while learning to fail, can teach us to thrive. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.